time, has not attention, for the First of the Blacks. It is that he
fears--not for himself, but for our country: he fears our ambition, our
revenge. He shall experience, however, that we are loyal--from myself,
his brother, to the mountain child who startles the vulture from the
rocks with his shouts of Bonaparte the Great. To engage our loyalty
before many witnesses," he continued, once more looking round upon the
assemblage, "I send this message through you, in return for that which I
have received. Tell the First Consul that, in the absence of
interference with the existing laws of the colony, I guarantee, under my
personal responsibility, the submission to order, and the devotion to
France, of my black brethren. Mark the condition, gentlemen, which you
will pronounce reasonable. Mark the condition, and you will find happy
results. You will soon see whether I pledge in vain my own
responsibility and your hopes."

Even while he spoke, in all the fervour of unquestionable sincerity, of
his devotion to France, his French hearers fell that he was virtually a
monarch. The First of the Blacks was not only supreme in this palace,
and throughout the colony; he had entered upon an immortal reign over
all lands trodden by the children of Africa. To the contracted gaze of
the diplomatists present, all might not be visible--the coming ages when
the now prophetic name of L'Ouverture should have become a bright fact
in the history of man, and should be breathed in thanksgiving under the
palm-tree, sung in exultation in the cities of Africa, and embalmed in
the liberties of the Isles of the West:--such a sovereignty as this was
too vast and too distant for the conceptions of Michel and Hedouville to
embrace; but they were impressed with a sense of his power, with a
feeling of the majesty of his influence; and the reverential emotions
which they would fain have shaken off, and which they were afterwards
ashamed of, were at the present moment enhanced by sounds which reached
them from the avenue. There was military music, the firing of salutes,
the murmur of a multitude of voices, and the tramp of horses and of men.

Toussaint courteously invited the commissaries to witness the
presentation to him, for the interests of France, of the keys of the
cities of the island, late in the possession of Spain, and now ceded to
France by the treaty of Bale. The commissaries could not refuse, and
took their stand on one side of the F